Arab League urges Syria to withdraw tanks from streets

A proposed Arab League plan to end months of bloodshed in Syria includes a demand to remove tanks from the streets, the pan-Arab group said as it awaited a response from Damascus to its suggested road map for peace on Monday.

"The Arab proposal to Syria calls for withdrawing tanks and all military vehicles to bring an immediate end to the violence and give assurances to the Syrian street," Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi told AFP in the Qatari capital Doha.

The Arab League was on Monday awaiting a response from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to its plan which, Arabi said, also calls for a dialogue to take place in Cairo between Syrian regime officials and opposition figures.

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"The entire region is at risk of a massive storm," Sheikh Hamad told reporters after Sunday's three-hour meeting.

Assad must take "concrete steps" to end the unrest that according to the United Nations has claimed more than 3,000 Syrian lives since March, he said.

"What is required of Syria ... are concrete steps that could avoid what happened to other countries," he said, in an apparent reference to Nato's military intervention in the popular uprising in Libya.

Sunday's Arab ministerial meeting "agreed on a serious proposal to stop the killing and all forms of violence in Syria," Sheikh Hamad said.

A follow-up meeting will be held Wednesday in Cairo, "whether or not there is an agreement," he added.

Assad warned in a newspaper interview that any Western intervention in Syria would cause an "earthquake" across the Middle East.

"Any problem in Syria will burn the whole region. If the plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region," Syria's embattled president told The Sunday Telegraph.

"Syria is the hub now in this region. It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake – do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans?" he asked.

A source close to the Syrian delegation told AFP meanwhile that Muallem, who is expected to give Assad's response to the Arab League proposal on Monday, was to hold talks with Qatar's Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

The Doha talks came as Syrian activists put mounting pressure on the Arab League to suspend Syria's membership of the 22-member bloc and organised protests across Syria on Sunday calling for the League to "freeze the membership" of Syria.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Syria continued to rise.

On Monday, a 29-year-old man was shot dead by a sniper in the protest hub city of Homs, a day after at least seven people were killed in violence in several cities including Homs, Hama, Idlib and Deraa, rights groups said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that security forces fired live rounds into a crowd of students protesting Monday at their college in the southern province of Deraa, cradle of seven months of anti-regime dissent.

Some of the students were also arrested, the watchdog said.

Almost 100 people were killed in Syria on Friday and Saturday, the two bloodiest days yet of the uprising, among them 30 Syrian security agents and dozens of civilians, according to Observatory.

In Damascus meanwhile, a national committee began work Monday "to draft a new constitution for Syria," the official SANA news agency reported.

A new constitution was one of the key demands of the Syrian opposition at the start of the anti-government protests in March. Now they are demanding Assad's ouster.